One in three US local businesses has no real web presence
What share of US local businesses still have no website in 2026?
We measured 2,288,171 US local businesses across 27 trades. 29.2% have no website at all, and a further 3.7% list only a social media profile, so 32.9%, roughly one in three, have no real web presence. It ranges from 68.4% of convenience stores down to 13.7% of orthodontists.
The source is our own 27 US local-trade files, built on 24 July 2026 from Google Maps business listings. Every business in those files is counted; nothing is sampled and nothing is weighted. The measurement script is measure-web-presence.mjs in this repository, and it reads the same source files the products ship.
Each record has a website field. We sort it into three buckets. Empty means no website. Social-only means the sole web address given is a social or link-in-bio profile. We treat instagram.com, facebook.com, linktr.ee, x.com, tiktok.com, youtube.com, yelp.com, business.site, wa.me, sites.google.com, wixsite.com, square.site and linkedin.com as profiles rather than sites. Everything else counts as a real website.
The headline figure is the first two buckets added together, and both are published separately so anyone who disagrees with where we drew the line can recompute it. Folding a business whose entire web presence is an Instagram page into "has a website" is the reason most published figures on this question are not usable.
What this does not measure: it is a census of these files, not of every business in America. A business that has a website but never added it to its Google Maps profile is counted here as having none. That gap makes our no-website figures a ceiling rather than an exact rate, and the honest way to read them is as the share of businesses you cannot reach through a website using this data.
The headline
Across 2,288,171 businesses in 27 trades, measured 24 July 2026:
| Measure | Businesses | Share |
|---|---|---|
| No website at all | 668,621 | 29.2% |
| Social profile only | 83,835 | 3.7% |
| No real web presence (both) | 752,456 | 32.9% |
| Has a real website | 1,535,715 | 67.1% |
Every trade, ranked
A five-fold spread between the top and bottom trade. The pattern is not about business size. It is about whether the trade's customers arrive by search or by street.
| Trade | Businesses | No site | Social only | No web presence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Convenience Stores | 50,924 | 64.6% | 3.8% | 68.4% |
| Barber Shops | 71,842 | 43.5% | 8.7% | 52.2% |
| Hair Salons | 143,966 | 37.9% | 8.9% | 46.7% |
| Cleaning Services | 134,185 | 38.5% | 3.5% | 42.1% |
| Painters | 90,060 | 37.9% | 3.9% | 41.7% |
| HVAC | 73,586 | 39.2% | 1.2% | 40.4% |
| Landscaping | 110,373 | 34.6% | 3.6% | 38.2% |
| Bakeries | 83,605 | 29.7% | 8.3% | 38% |
| Clothing Stores | 95,545 | 32.2% | 4.8% | 36.9% |
| Moving Companies | 72,057 | 35.5% | 1.1% | 36.6% |
| Plumbers | 50,724 | 35.1% | 1.6% | 36.6% |
| Tree Services | 51,959 | 32.9% | 3.7% | 36.6% |
| Carpenters | 70,489 | 32.1% | 3.1% | 35.2% |
| Jewelry Stores | 49,525 | 29.8% | 4.9% | 34.7% |
| Pharmacies | 28,473 | 33.1% | 0.8% | 33.9% |
| General Contractors | 189,224 | 28.1% | 1.9% | 30% |
| Furniture Stores | 40,365 | 24% | 4% | 28.1% |
| Food & Beverage | 172,242 | 22.8% | 5.2% | 28% |
| Bookstores | 22,636 | 21.8% | 5.5% | 27.2% |
| Pest Control | 26,144 | 25% | 1.2% | 26.2% |
| Kitchen Remodeling | 102,286 | 21.9% | 2.5% | 24.4% |
| Roofers | 32,105 | 21.5% | 1% | 22.5% |
| Healthcare | 196,566 | 21.4% | 0.3% | 21.7% |
| Restaurant | 166,556 | 16.6% | 4.9% | 21.5% |
| Medical Spas | 65,453 | 12.1% | 3.1% | 15.2% |
| Hotels | 56,973 | 14.4% | 0.4% | 14.8% |
| Orthodontist | 40,308 | 13.3% | 0.4% | 13.7% |
Instagram has replaced the website for personal-service trades
The social-only column is the more interesting half of this data, because it separates businesses that never went online from businesses that went online somewhere else.
Hair salons (8.9%), barber shops (8.7%) and bakeries (8.3%) have the highest social-only rates in the set: roughly one in eleven runs its entire web presence from a profile page. These are businesses whose product is visual and whose customers are consumers, and Instagram serves them better than a website would.
The trades sit at the opposite end. HVAC (1.2%), moving companies (1.1%), roofers (1.0%) and pharmacies (0.8%) almost never use a social profile as their web presence. When those businesses are missing a website they are simply absent from the web, not present elsewhere.
That distinction matters commercially. A hair salon with an Instagram page can be reached; an HVAC contractor with an empty website field usually cannot be reached any way except the phone.
Why this is worth knowing before you buy any local data
Every vendor selling local business data sells record counts. Almost none publish what share of those records carry a working website, because the number is unflattering and easy to hide behind a total.
If you are buying local business data for email or web-based outreach, the record count is not the number that matters. On a convenience-store file, two thirds of the rows cannot be reached that way at any price. On an orthodontist file, seven in eight can.
We publish the rate per file so the count means something. The phone and address columns remain complete regardless, which is why these trades are still worth reaching, just not by the channel most buyers assume.